Page 30 of Heated
“What are you doing?” She whips her head to the side so our faces are only inches apart, and a light honey-and-almond scent envelops me, teases me. I inhale it, trap it on my tongue, in my lungs. “Why are we here?”
“I haven’t quite figured that out yet,” I admit.
It’s not a lie. My hastily thought-of plan drove me here. But part of me hasn’t decided if it also wasn’t simply the desire to see her again. Or an exercise in self-control. Dangling what I shouldn’t take in front of me to see if I possess enough discipline to keep my hands to myself, to walk away. Or tempt myself with this sensual form of edging by embracing what I shouldn’t. The sweet disturbance.
The ambiguous answer seems to be the correct one, though. The tension slowly ebbs out of her body, and she props an elbow on the chair’s arm.
“That makes the two of us, then, because I haven’t figured out yet why I came here.” She huffs out a soft breath and briefly dips her head to stare at her cup before lifting it again to look at me. “I’m certain of one thing, though. This isn’t right or smart.”
“Why? Because you’re Val’s friend?” I slice a hand between us. “She’s already seeing someone new. Probably was before she sent you to do her hatchet job. So I don’t care about that.”
“Is that what this is, then?” she murmurs. “Revenge? Payback? You plan to throw”—she twirls a hand in the air—“whatever we’re doing here back in her face one day for breaking up with you and moving on too quickly?”
I almost laugh long and loud at that bullshit.
“That’s not going to happen.”
“You were in a relationship for months. Possibly in love with her. You don’t know what you’ll do.”
“There aren’t many things that are a one hundred percent certainty. Weather, election outcomes, the price of gas, Hollywood marriages. But this I can state without a shadow of a doubt. Not happening.”
She studies me, and I can practically read all the questions in those brown eyes.How can you? Why? What happened?
But she lifts her cup and drinks, and instead of asking what she so clearly wants to know, she says, “Not my business.”
“Isn’t it?” She frowns, and I absently rub the pad of my thumb over my denim-covered thigh, imagining it is that small wrinkled patch of skin above her nose. “When you chose to put yourself in the middle of our relationship, it became your business.” The moment comprehension dawns, her eyes widen, then narrow. But I lean forward, a smile curving my mouth. And that smile? It’s possible it isn’t nice. Becausenicedoesn’t accurately describe this uncomfortable and unwanted gnawing inside of me. I’m feeling hungry. “You owe me.”
I both hear and see the hitch in her breath, but she doesn’t let on. The almost nonchalant note in her voice belies the worry in her eyes. Too bad for her; I make a living at reading people. Too bad she’s shit at hiding her emotions. God, I could fuckingfeast, become a damngluttonon her honesty.
“What?” she whispered.
“You heard me.”
“Yes, I heard you.” My own breath really shouldn’t quicken or my blood pump hotter at the sound of those words coming through clenched teeth. Or the sight of her hand wrapped tighter around her cup. As if only her grip on the cardboard container is preventing her from transferring it to my neck. Hell, I almost remove the cup from her grasp myself. “But obviously I don’t understand your meaning. I owe you for what?”
For witnessing my weakest moments since leaving my aunt’s house. For reminding me that my life, my world, is not in my control. For throwing me back to that twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-year-old uncertain boy again.
For refusing to be evicted from my head like a sexy, stubborn squatter.
For being my answer, my salvation, in this moment, when for years I’ve vowed to depend only on myself.
And her most heinous sin? For deviating from my carefully laid-out plans. For stepping outside those lines and hungering for something, someone, I have no business desiring.
But I say none of that because those reasons are mine and mine alone.
She gets, “For not stepping back and letting Val have the guts to do her own dirty work. Instead, you got involved where you shouldn’t. You allowed yourself to be her patsy, and I’m pissed with you and her about that. I’m also mad as hell that you both stole the chance for me to have my say.”
Stole my control in the situation. Left me rudderless, powerless.
Resentment stirs in my chest, mixing with the desire, creating a murky, swirling mess so I can’t extricate one emotion from the other.
A starkness enters her eyes, and she briefly closes them before glancing away, her hair concealing most of her profile. Fisting those curls and moving them out of the way so I can see her expression, her thoughts, is such a fierce urge I shift away from her. As far back as the chair permits.
“I didn’t think about that. About stealing your voice. I’m truly sorry for that.”
I believe her. But I’m not letting it go that easily. It isn’t in my interest to.
“Look at me,” I say softly. I order softly. And a coil in my gut draws almost painfully, sweetly tight when she obeys. “You owe me. And I’m offering a form of ... penance.”
